Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Barter Trade. The AMA took place on August 16 and our guests were Anurag Yadav ( CEO at Barter ) and Manmeet (Operations).
The total reward pool was $750 and it was splitted into three parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarize some of the most interesting points for you.
PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
Serg | Satoshi Club: Hello, dear community! Our guests today are from @BarterTradeofficial. They had a very successful public sale on 14th of August. Congratulations. I was lucky to be able to participate. 🙂
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: Congrats guys and thanks for joining us today.
Serg | Satoshi Club: @Yaanurag, @garlamw, @manmeetBT Welcome!
Manmeet: Hey @sspurss thanks for having us. Yes, sale was a great success and it was sold out under 30 seconds. Here are some stats from the sale. We reverted back 38000 ETH ($16.7m).
Serg | Satoshi Club: Wow. I didn’t see this numbers since the ICO era. 😁
Manmeet: Although it matters very little to us but BART is listed on uniswap and is trading at 4x the public sale price and 6x the pre-sale price. I can put in the link to uniswap if you would like.
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: How are you feeling? Is the party scheduled? 😊
Manmeet: Hah, fundraise is for the development of our project and further expansion but yea of course we will raise a toast for the success of this stage.
Anurag Yadav: Thanks Serg for having us here today. And, thanks for the kind words about the project. Yes, things have been successful. But, the real job awaits now. The job of going about delivering on all the promises we made.
Serg | Satoshi Club: I am really for happy for this success. Could you briefly introduce yourself?
Anurag Yadav: Sure. I’m the CEO at Barter. Been in the Crypto business for now nearly 5 years. Started a niche custom technology solutions development firm (www.primafelicitas.com) in 2013, with offices in San Francisco, London & Delhi. In 2016 we pivoted to Blockchain development and since 2018 being building products at the intersection of Blockchain, AI & IoT. Barter was conceptualized & incubated at PrimaFelicitas coming out of our frustrations with using existing Crypto Exchanges. The idea was to build a product that’s seamless & frictionless for the community.
Q1 from Telegram User @reidman_rosa
There are lots and lots of exchanges. It is hard to find something new. Most of the things or strategies are copied from other projects. What is your new input? how would you attract users to use your platform? Because many are already happy with the exchanges they have.
Manmeet: Yes, you are correct. Coming to the first part of your question: If you go deep inside the exchange market and try to understand it, you will know the bulk of the market is an empty shell. At Least 90% of the platforms are boxes filled with fake volumes, 0 liquidity, and No real products. The market is dominated by clones/ replicas of one another. Most of the exchanges don’t even have basic order types such as stop-loss let alone any real product. Leaving only a handful of exchanges that are real in terms of the user base, liquidity, and volumes but still some of them lack actual products that benefit users.
Check out this recent expose of a Top 50 exchange by our team member and Coinmarket cap appreciated it and promised to take action: https://twitter.com/ManmeetBRT/status/1275858676671078401?s=20 …Space is filled with such projects. This is the situation in the top 50 exchanges, imagine what else lies below and beyond.
As for the second part of your question: We have been working on this for the past 18 months. Completely self-funded. We could have done an ICO in late 2017 or early 2018 but we didn’t because we faced and suffered on the hands of many projects that scammed people and disappeared into thin air with millions of $$$. We started this project in mid-2018 with an aim and vision that we will develop our project on our own money and then go into the market with a product that is not just a paper. Once achieved, then go for fundraising in order to expand, improve, and innovate the project further. Some people might say that why risk so much without any surety. Well, that’s that, there is no real answer to it but hey, we have reached our soft cap within the 5 days of the sale. We are not selling a paper during the IEO but instead, we have a product. We call it an MVP but it is a full product for many exchanges. A launch ready Spot trading platform with some of the unique Order types. Since we have a lot of features in the pipeline, therefore, we call it an MVP. Since we all (team members) are traders as well as early adopters and had the experience of trading on a number of exchanges. We always felt that there is a lot more to exchange and no one really concentrated on providing services to the users that users want.
Our aim from the start was to build products and features that help users and make trading easy. The first introduction to this was the build of the PIE order type. Then we wrote down the idea of Social trading, then algo trading further we worked on Battlegrounds, P2P lending, Marketplace, SAF (tokenized fund), EazyPay, and much more.
We pride ourselves in saying that we are an exchange that empowers users. We are not just another exchange but much more, a complete ecosystem of real trading products for traders. An Easy, Smart, Social, and Gamified way to trade cryptocurrencies.
Anurag Yadav: Also, to add to this, we are strongly driven by a very transparent platform with a real focus on solving the pain points in a very empathetic way. This is as I stated coming from our personal experiences and also because several of my team has been Traders for a long time both in Crypto & Traditional Markets.
Serg | Satoshi Club: since many members of this group are traders, I think it will be interesting for us to try it. Are there any restrictions btw? for some countries?
Anurag Yadav: The way we envisioned was that amateur/first-timer to professional traders all should like the trading experience. I would love to hear the feedback of the trader community here. 🙂
Manmeet: US citizens will not be allowed for starters. We will have a separate license and platform for them.
Q2 from Bitcointalk User nyosant
Barter Trade’s PIE orders go one step beyond OCO orders and allow to place a buy and sell order at the same time, but how is that even possible? I mean, how can you place an order to sell tokens that you haven’t bought yet?
Anurag Yadav: Thanks for asking this question. I really love to reply to this all the time. My fav!
Owing to time constraints, today’s traders are unable to conduct intensive market analysis. Whether it is executing a buy order at a bottomish price or a sell order at an expected top, traders often suffer losses and miss out on making potentially profitable trades due to high volatility in the crypto markets. Barter Trade PIE is an advanced market order for cryptocurrency traders which provides a solution for various unavoidable situations. The PIE algorithm allows users to place sell orders for their pending buy orders along with an option to put a stop loss to your buy, whilst the stop loss provides you with an option to either limit stop loss or trail your stop loss. Traditionally it is impossible to place the sell order unless your buy order has been executed because the most the market provides you is an OCO, which is one-cancels-the-other allowing users with the option to place 2 orders at the same time and not more but, the PIE algorithm solves this problem, by allowing users to place simultaneous buy, sell and stop-loss orders for a particular trade in a single go.
Manmeet can you please add the screenshot from the application to show this?
Manmeet: This screenshot is from the first version, the latest will have a lot of changes. As you can see in the image. it allows you place a buy order, than a stoploss to it (option to trail as well) and sell order for that as well. It works like an also.
Serg | Satoshi Club: That’s great. Is there smth similar in the market or you are the first ones?
Manmeet: We havent seen this order type in any of the exchanges.
Anurag Yadav: To the best of my knowledge, we are the first ones. I haven’t seen anything similar so far.
Manmeet: Having a stoploss on most exchanges is a privilege in itself.
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: Where did you get the idea? Can you share this story?
Manmeet: To be honest, it was just a random thought during the early 2018 days when the markets were too volatile and we had to sit in front of the screen all night because markets used to pump and dump like crazy. This helps avoid sleepless nights as you can set your orders in advance.
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: You’ll sleep much better now and your users as well. 😊
Manmeet: Hopefully, BTW this is a working product and not just a screenshot. Scheduled to go live in September.
Q3 from Bitcointalk User k.muller
30% of the tokens are reserved for the company and 12% for the team. This is a big amount. Tell us what do you plan to do with them once they are released? Do you plan to sell, hodl, invest?
Manmeet: These tokens are meant to use for the project development, team salaries and over all expansion of the company when we run out of funds in a worst case scenario. As you can see in the attached screenshot, the tokens have a 5 year vesting period for Project and 4 year vesting period for the team.
If the business flourishes (which it will) and there are no funds required from the company reserve than these tokens can be locked back after the unlock as this function is built into our contract.
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: Hopefully you won’t need it.Do you guys want to add something to this answer or can we proceed to Q4?
Anurag Yadav: Well, as you see from the long vesting period for the team that we are fully focused and committed to this long-term…and without sounding boastful, we do aim to be one of the top – clean, transparent, ethical & community-focused exchange (we call ourselves People First Exchange).
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: I think crypto space is in great need of this kind of projects. Kudos guys.
Q4 from Telegram User @aminapeter8
One of the feature of Barter trade exchange is eazypay which allows traders to share economy/ transact without involving third-party. My question is that how will barter trade solve the cases where disputes between buyers and sellers arise?
Manmeet: It is fairly simple and tried and tested method. Advanced Escrow system and on top of that a 24/7 support for fast resolutions.
Serg | Satoshi Club: So, you will have support which will available instantly to solve this.
Manmeet: Have you used local bitcoins? The process will be a lot similar to most extent. More features, better support, smoother experience and support for a number of altcoins.
Anurag Yadav: Yes, we will have a 24/7 customer support team. Multilingual….Of course, this Multilingual aspect will be introduced as our community grows into various languages.
Manmeet: Major difference will be that people who buy sell fiat on Eazypay will have the option to either withdraw that fiat to their bank account or trade it on our Fiat pairs.
Q5 from Telegram User @nata_jakarta
I am so mad because I missed the sale on 14th… and now the price is skyrocketing… Will I have any opportunity to participate in a sale you will be offering?
Anurag Yadav: I’m sorry to hear that you missed out on the opportunity to buy during the Public Sale. Actually, the Pre-Sale was completed in less than 90 min, the Public-Sale is less than 30 sec. Yesterday the price was close to 5.5X and today it is well above 4X. So, at this point, my suggestion would be to buy it in the open market.
I do want to add, we love community members like you who support the project and keep tracking things. All the best with the purchase.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Do you plan to attract strategic investors in the future? do you have some tokens allocated for them?
Anurag Yadav: As you might have heard us say that we self-funded the entire project for the past 18 months (since inception) and didn’t fall for the lure of IEOs etc. We were heads down focused on building the tech – a solid product to show to the community and not just a project on paper. So, we basically bypassed the Strategic investment stage through our own funds. With the current round of sales, we are good to run the company and meet our expenses going forward – as per the plan. Any new funds injection would be mostly through VC route.
Serg | Satoshi Club: So, everyone who wants to invest should buy in the free market now. 🙂
Q6 from Telegram User @Aleurich
How is the deflationary mechanism of $BART? Are there any benefits for long-term holders?
Anurag Yadav: For this, we have a re-purchasing plan. Every quarter, at least 15% of profits will be used to buy back BART and burn them until 50% of all BART have been repurchased and destroyed so that only 120m BART remains after this exercise. All buy-back transactions will be announced to the community prior to occurrence. Users will be able to review the buy-back via Blockchain explorer.
So, the long-term holders will benefit from both the value appreciation and also from the utilitarian component of the token which we intend to add.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Good opportunity for the long term hodlers.
PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY LIVE QUESTIONS
The chat was open for 80 seconds; more than 500 questions were posted by Satoshi Club community. Our guests chose some of them.
Q1 from Telegram User @yadav_199
As I know Bartertrade is registered in Estonia, but you guys are Trying to register in Dubai and Hong Kong soon, so why question is why question is why you guys need to change your registered country? Due you guys faced legalization issue? On which market you guys are focusing on now?
Manmeet: There are no legal issues but the thing is there are restrictions for some countries if we operate just from Estonia. To provide service to maximum number of countries, we need to be flexible be registered in other places as well.
Q2 from Telegram User @Eva990
There is plan does Barter Trade intend to do like staking $BRT, lending or something similar?
Manmeet: Staking is coming very soon for BART holder. This not officially announced yet but it will be available very soon. Sooner than we launch our exchange in September.
Q3 from Telegram User @Nickkiii
Kindly explain how ALGO TRADING works?
Anurag Yadav: Some of the salient features that will benefit the Trading Community:
- Improve risk-adjusted portfolio yields.
- Leverage high-frequency trading, deep Blockchain analysis, and information unavailable even to seasoned traders.
- Automate risk management, maximizing returns while giving investors control over risk appetite.
- Simply investing (set it and forget it) while retaining control of risk appetite. Turn on conservative hedging against fiat, more opportunistic strategies, or turn off the Algo anytime to simply hold.
- Multidimensional strategies best handled via high frequency, data analysis by AI. For example, Algo AI may take a long position on an altcoin rising against Bitcoin.
On a crypto bear indication, the AI gracefully exists to a long Fiat, then uses Fiat gains to enter a stronger position in Bitcoin upon bull crypto indicators.
- Higher risk-adjusted return by leveraging both fiat arbitrage and trading opportunities (dips and rises in the market).
- Automatically fund trades via exchange tokens, simplifying trading even further.
- Query detailed information and analysis about markets at any time, providing detailed block analysis unavailable to most traders.
- Cross-exchange trading to boost gains even further
As you can read above, the AI is smart and scalable. It is not a basic trading bot where you inject tech indicators. The AI takes into account 100’s of metrics, Blockchain analysis, Multi-exchange order book analysis, Technical analysis, Statistical anomaly analysis, Stable coin arbitrage, and Overall supply, demand analysis, and whatnot.
Q4 from Telegram User @martindouglas2
You plan to open P2P lending. Will that process be automated and will you offer some liquidity or will it be purely P2P? Will margin lending be allowed on the platform or only spot rates?
Manmeet: As you all may know, lending in general is a passive way to earn income on your savings or holdings in Cryptocurrencies by lending it to others and earning interest on it.
Our P2P lending will be a fairly decentralized process although it will be on a centralized system. Barter Trade’s P2P lending will go hand-in-hand with the margin trading on Barter Trade’s platform. Barter trade’s p2p lending will allow users to earn interest on their cryptocurrencies by lending it to other users with the option to select the different cryptocurrencies, stable coins, time period to lend (min to max), and the interest rate lender wants to charge the borrower. On the other hand, Margin trade allows users to trade with borrowed funds. The lending amount will be available to the users for margin trading who will pay the interest on the borrowed amounts. Barter Trade will connect lenders (willing to earn interest on holdings) and borrowers (willing to do margin trade) peer to peer according to their orders placed in the order book. The lending amount will be available for borrowers as a whole or in partial amount as per the required conditions. If the borrower opens a position that requires a portion of the lent amount, Barter trade will allocate that portion to the borrower, and the rest of the lent amount will be available for other borrowers.
Regarding the Question of Liquidity, yes we will have our own liquidity but our interest rates will be fixed but on the other hand, the users on the platform will have the ability to set up custom interest rates for the amount hey wanna lend or borrow.
Q5 from Telegram User @MrHappy1997
From a startup project to a mainstream project, being a pioneer in the industry, do BART team anticipate that many new startups will show up and compete?
Manmeet: We believe that if you are competing with someone then you are already lagging behind. We like to walk in our own lane and keep working heads down. Building our products in time and make them available in the market. We strongly believe that if you provide products that actually benefit people. People will automatically come and use your platform.
Q6 from Telegram User @Momjk
What are you most excited about Barter Trade’ features?
Manmeet: I am most excited about Social trading as it benefits all type of traders. Professional traders provide services to novice traders in a transparent and most efficient manner. While the novice/noob traders get to follow highly experienced traders based on their performance. Here is the detailed explanation of social trading.
Social trading is a unique way to Trade, Learn, and Earn alongside your fellow traders. One aspect of social trading is copy trading. Copy trading allows you to copy other successful traders or monetize your own trading strategies if you are a good trader yourself. No need to follow a paid group leader anymore. Follow people that really trade.
Choose your trader based on a number of metrics i.e. Profitability, Max losses, Account Life, Pool balance, No. of followers, Trade history, Traders fee, Account’s Risk score thus reducing the risk of the following someone substantially, highlighting transparency and helping people make better decisions based on real-time market and performance data.
Benefits for the followers:
- 1: Hassle-free trading experience. Click follow and start trading.
- 2: Follow the most successful/profitable Master traders from the leaderboard.
- 3: Choose the best trader for you based on a number of metrics mentioned above.
- 4: Cancel your subscription anytime.
- 5: Follow people that really trade.
Benefits for the master trader:
- 1: Earn income just by sharing your trading history, performance data, and allowing people to follow your trades.
- 2: Set a standard fee for following you or a % commission on the amount of profit, traders earn by following you.
- 3: Earn a 40% commission on trading fees generated from the list of your followers.
Other aspects of social trading will include products related to mutual investing/ First introduction to this list is SAF i.e. smart assets fund
Barter Trade’s SAF is an individual managed tokenized Fund Market consisting of one or a number of cryptocurrencies. In simple words, SAF is similar to mutual funds but built on the concept of tokenization. A SAF trader is a Portfolio manager with whom other users can invest their cryptocurrencies. SAF provides the users with little-to-no experience an opportunity to trade alongside highly professional traders. Every fund listed on the SAF market is tokenized and reflects as a token on the SAF markets. Barter Trade SAF’s is highly unique and advanced as compared to traditional markets, a user never directly invests in a SAF and loses hold of his assets at any time but instead he/she follows a SAF which would be based on a number metrics i.e. Type of assets, Past performance, Experience of the trader etc. This gives the user power of exiting the SAF at any preferred time. The SAF market will be highly sophisticated where our system will analyze the real time data and performance of the market and the performance of the FUND will reflect on the graphical chart. Every listed SAF would reflect:
- Current portfolio
- Past Performance
- No of followers
- General information of trader i.e. Social profiles, experience etc.
SAF’s market will leverage traders in making smart decisions while choosing where and when to invest. We all know that the crypto community is filled with noise and scams of paid groups. Every other person with zero to no TA or FA knowledge claims to be a crypto guru. SAF would widely help reduce that noise and bring stability to overall sentiment of the crypto traders because the users will be following a SAF based on real time performance data which will reflect on the trading chart. Additionally, SAF hugely benefits the portfolio managers and adds a lot of value to their trading. There are several benefits that traders obtain for running a SAF. These include
- 1: Commission on trading fees
- 2: Commission on Profits earned
- 3: Respect among traders
Q7 from Telegram User @philicrohit
Recently BRTX burned 191,540,687 token, how it was decided to burn this much quantity of coin, do you have more planed buyback and burn program in future?
Manmeet: This question is not selected but answering anyway: You need to read our article explaining the burn. This burn has nothing to do with our Main Token.
Q8 from Telegram User @kaltumia
Common needs of exchanges are server overload protection and liquidity resolution. How does Barter Trade solve server overload and liquidity issues?
Manmeet: We will start by explaining why most exchanges have a lack of liquidity and what are the major reasons for it.
- 1: Not enough traders to trade the assets
- 2: Not enough volume or Fake volumes.
For any exchange to be successful. It needs to have a deep and liquid market.
Deep: A market with many buyers and sellers
Liquid: A market were assets can be bought and sold quickly.
To ensure Traders, we are partnering with a number of projects with an agreement which will make our exchange the first exchange partner for them. Meaning, our exchange will be highlighted as the preferred exchange within their communities. Announcements for some of these partnerships are already out and some will start rolling out in the upcoming weeks. We will also be partnering with a number of influencers to get the word out about our exchange, its products and why it stands out. Apart from this, there are a lot of other activities to bring users. On top of course, features of our platform that people would want to use to make their trading easy. Additionally, a lot of targeted marketing that will start post launch.
Where else does the liquidity come from? Some overview and then the answer:
For any trading markets it is estimated (although we are giving a conservative estimate) that ever 1$ that is being put in the trading markets it is being traded at least 10 times (in traditional markets it is estimated at 200 times) meaning, if we are putting $1m of real liquidity in our platform our Real/volume would be at least $10m if it is being traded for. Whilst we intend to do a lot more in terms of bringing in liquidity. This is just an example. Our goal for the first 2 years is to bring $50m of real liquidity of our own and if we achieve half of it that would mean we have done incredibly well. Apart from this, a lot of other factors will add to this, market sentiment, growth of projects listed on our platform, growth of our products. Combining these, exact estimates are impossible.
2nd thing, which is the professional approach for bringing legit liquidity. We will be partnering with a number of Liquidity providers, one of them being Houbi mena. Most liquidity providers provide liquidity options for top 20-30 coins on CMC but Houbi mena provides liquidity for 200+. This provides us with an option to list a lot of alts that are micro caps and are in high demand.
Why do most exchanges fail to achieve this? I.e. Liquid books.
There are only a handful of exchanges that have liquid platforms. It is because Projects don’t really spend money on things that users want. Many popular exchanges don’t even have a stop loss order integrated into their platform let alone other order types. Imagine, if someone is not spending money on developing a basic order type, which is fairly cheap to do so if you are doing an exchange business, then how can you expect them to spend money on liquidity, which is fairly costly. The answer to this is, they can do washtrading and fake volumes. Faking volumes and doing wash trading is incredibly easy and cheap. So, most of these platforms that you see in top 50 all of a sudden are results of wash trading because wash trading volumes have no limit. If you trade in those exchanges you will see that your withdrawals will mostly be stuck for a number hour to days. This is because of fake liquidity on these exchanges and lack of real volumes in their cold wallets. These are just some of the things to answer your questions, Although, no exchange talks about these things because if they do, users will become knowledgeable of their operations and then they will have to answer a lot of questions.
See for example FTX is just a yearold exchange and already among the top exchanges, reason being, delivering quality products and fulfilling user needs. If you offer something that the market lacks, users will consume it irrespective of your entry to the market.
Q9 from Telegram User @kaltumia
Common needs of exchanges are server overload protection and liquidity resolution. How does Barter Trade solve server overload and liquidity issues?
Manmeet: Apart from this, there are a lot of other things that we will do to combat those things but they are confidential due to NDA’s and security reasons but their effect will reflect on the platform when it is live. For server loading etc: We have a highly efficient team that working round the clock to manage that and scale servers real time in a situation of high traffic.
Q10 from Telegram User @sivaa32
We all talk about Positive points/Pros/Good Points & Features of any Project, no one Project tell about their Cons. So can you tell us Honestly the Cons & Lacks of BART?
Anurag Yadav: Thanks for asking this question.
I think the way we presented ourselves during the days could have been much better. I remember 3 months ago when we started approaching communities, influencers, we didn’t get a lot of support. In addition, after having put in all our money in building the tech, we are still a little less confident about user acceptance since the Exchange Market is very crowded and there are so many of us.
But, the overwhelming support of the community and how things have shaped up, and how influencers etc., have approached us has been really very satisfying. And, it makes us feel a lot confident as we go about delivering on the promises we made.
No one is perfect, neither we are. But, we have been very proactive in trying to stay ahead of regulatory needs and address any issues that might arrive. We continue to learn and grow from that perspective every day. The good thing is we are a group of very humble folks always willing to learn and open to feedback. So, for most things/changes on our platform, we have the setup to seek community feedback and affect them.
Q11 from Telegram User @Devil_Crypto
Future trading is currently new trend, So, what are your impressions and opinions on newer exchanges doing Futures Trading?
Manmeet: Futures is one our priorities as we see it is in trend right now. We expect it to launch ahead of the scheduled date. There is currently a lot on our plate but we are sure that we will be able to make it happen ahead of the schedule.
Q12 from Telegram User @melanintrish
Could you please tell me just a little more about the BarterTrade team and some of their backgrounds? I have personally seen many projects launch with inexperienced team members, and some of those didn’t go so well due to easily avoidable mistakes.
Anurag Yadav: Well as I stated in one of my earlier responses that our team comprises of seasoned traders. Some have been avid Crypto Traders since 2014 or so and few of them go back even further (as Stock Market Traders) to 2005. So, our team comprises of solid folks there. Besides, our Tech team has been hard hitters they have already built a variety of Blockchain-based products for clients in the past few years, so have strong know-how and expertise there. Background-wise, I’m a Stanford University graduate and an Engineering Undergrad from IIT (India).
So, all in all, we have a very solid team that has gotten us this far, and we will surely be looking forward to adding more people to make this team even stronger.
PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO
As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about Barter Trade. A link to a Quiz form were sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer. 450$ were distributed among the winners.
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